


The Moment You Feel

by whopooh



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Introspection, MFMM Year of Quotes, e e cummings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-01-11
Packaged: 2019-03-03 15:11:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13343829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whopooh/pseuds/whopooh
Summary: Mac misses her friend who has flown away to England.(This is kind of my proper contribution to the January challenge.)





	The Moment You Feel

**Author's Note:**

> For the MFMM Year of Quotes, the January challenge. Based on:
> 
> “Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.”  
> e e cummings

Doctor Macmillan has been a doctor for more than a decade; it is an integral part of her life and identity. She has a brain as sharp as a razor, and she worked her way through the medical education as a top student—against some of the professors’ wishes—just to prove that women could. The number of things she has learned by heart is staggering; she is able to reel off chemical substances, bones and organs as well as plants and medical history; she can assess differences in wounds at a moment’s notice and her skill in palpitating pregnant women is unparalleled. 

Mac is an encyclopaedia of other people’s thoughts, she has thousands of voices in her head—she thinks this as she cuts into a dead man’s skin to do an autopsy and find out his cause of death. The voices have given her knowledge about life and death and all the ailments in between, and perhaps they have made her a cynic too—knowing how to keep her distance, knowing how to be the scientifically minded person commenting from the side line. _The poor bugger_ , is all she thinks about the dead man, before she gently starts to uncover his secrets. 

The facts reside in her and saturate her mind, even as she resists much of their hidden ideology—things she hates about her colleagues’ views on racial differences and ideas about women’s place, homosexuals, misfits, and what to teach the younger generation. That part makes her angry. She seeks to enlighten the new students, to spread her knowledge about family planning to women who otherwise would never hear of it, and support women who are left to their own devices. She surprised herself when she took up the position as coroner, but it has proved to be the same thing: giving a voice, and justice, to people who can’t speak up for themselves. 

In this, she and her best friend are very alike. What Phryne does in passion, Mac does methodically, following careful analysis. 

These thoughts come to her this sunny Thursday afternoon in April, when she busies herself at the morgue. The man in front of her is a new murder victim; she doesn’t have an identity for him yet, although she knows already roughly why he died. He’s looking very small and lopsided on her bench. Mac misses Phryne like a stab in the gut—her sharp eyes, her energy, and her unrelenting interest in bringing justice to the stricken and the forgotten. 

There has been no word from her for a while now. _Perhaps she won’t come back again. Perhaps the world holds too many adventures and distractions away from Melbourne_. The thought comes unbidden, but Mac finds she needs to sit down and take a deep breath. The idea of life in Melbourne once again without Phryne Fisher—of never getting to hug her, joke with her or be drawn into her mad schemes—is unbearable. The acute sense of loss awakes all the layers of grief she carries within her, reminding her forcefully that she is Elizabeth Macmillan, and not an encyclopaedia. 

The losses that have formed her: Mac’s beloved kelpie and best friend during her childhood years, his ears always eagerly awaiting a new exclamation from his young redhaired friend. Little blonde and trusting Janey Fisher. The realisation she doesn’t feel anything for men, however hard she tried as a teenager. The father who died before they had a chance to reconcile after Mac stated she would never marry and instead moved to Europe to study—he never got to see her as a doctor, that she actually managed it. The knowledge still makes her sad. Her first love, who left her for a man because she craved conventionality; Mac still remembers how her long, blonde hair would splay out on the sheets after they’d made love. Her second love, the humorous dark-haired woman who worked in her unit during the war, and who died from an explosion while nursing wounded soldiers at the front. Daisy, sweet, kind Daisy who was so meaninglessly slaughtered in the factory. 

The sight of the dead man’s opened body before her suddenly makes her recollections of them all too vivid. She takes a break to look out the window, lighting a cigarette, the trees slowly billowing in the wind.

All these losses, all the layers of pain that were excruciatingly hard but have also formed her, reminding her of exactly who she is and what she holds dear in life; layers upon layers of what is her life, hers and no one else’s. _Everything I love seems to be taken from me._ The thought is unexpected, surprising, and Mac can feel moisture form behind her eyelids. Even as she arches her eyebrow sternly and accuses herself of being maudlin, she can’t shake the feeling. 

It’s not that she seeks conventionality or overt stability, far from it – she loves her life of intellectual enquiry, intriguing challenges and the Adventuresses’ Club. But sometimes she needs just a tiny bit of stability and care—things so many seem to take for granted. _Has she been placing her need for stability on Phryne Fisher, of all people?_ she asks herself, smiling as she stiches the man up and lays her tools back in their right places after cleaning them. _What has she been thinking?_

Even as she chastises herself about it, the telephone rings. She takes off her protective gloves and answers. Dorothy Collins’ light, sweet voice is on the other end, informing her that Phryne has telegraphed and is coming home in ten days’ time. Even as the threatening tear finally does spill, Mac finds her throat constrict in a curious laugh. She feels a calmness take over her; a calmness completely at odds with the havoc Phryne Fisher usually wreaks within her life. 

“Phryne is coming home,” she says aloud. 

It seems that what Phryne wreaks is just the right amount of havoc, just the right amount of love and life, and Mac will soon have it again.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you scruggzi for beta reading!


End file.
